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Counterconstitutionalism, Richard Albert

Dalhousie Law Journal

Democratic constitutionalism has often erected a high barrierseparating the citizen from the state. This is paradoxical because the very promise of constitutionalism is to produce precisely the opposite result: to bind the citizen to the state, and to create and cultivate a constitutional culture that is anchored in participatory democracy. The author has a name for this paradoxical state of affairs: counterconstitutionalism. In this article, the author introduces and illustrates the conceptof counterconstitutionalism with reference to billsof rights in constitutional states representing civil and common law traditions on four continents.